Department of Cognitive Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Universitat Hamburg.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2022 Jan;151(1):263-284. doi: 10.1037/xge0001075. Epub 2021 Jul 15.
Storing motivationally salient experiences preferentially in long-term memory is generally adaptive. Although such relevant experiences are often immediately obvious, a problem arises when the relevance of initially ambiguous events becomes evident sometime after encoding. Is there a mechanism that enables the retroactive enhancement of specific memories? Recent evidence suggests the existence of such a mechanism that selectively strengthens weak memories for neutral stimuli from one category when their respective category gains motivational significance later. Although such a selective retroactive memory enhancement has considerable implications for adaptive memory, evidence for this phenomenon is based on only few studies. Here, we report data from four attempts to replicate category-specific retroactive memory enhancements for neutral stimuli from a category that was later predictive of aversive electric shocks. Although our data showed enhanced memory for the arousing stimuli themselves as well as related subsequent stimuli, none of our experiments provided any evidence for category-specific retroactive memory enhancement when strictly replicating the analysis strategy from the original study. In an additional analysis focusing on high confidence memory only, one of four experiments indicated a significant retroactive memory effect but only in corrected recognition and not in d' based on signal detection theory. In an analysis pooled across all experiments, we found a small but significant retroactive memory effect again solely for high-confidence corrected recognition, although the corresponding Bayesian analysis indicated even substantial evidence for the null hypothesis. Overall, our data cast doubt on the reliability and generalizability of the proposed selective retroactive enhancement of initially weak memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
将动机相关的经验优先存储在长期记忆中通常是适应性的。尽管这些相关的经验通常是显而易见的，但当最初模棱两可的事件的相关性在编码后不久变得明显时，就会出现问题。是否有一种机制可以使特定记忆得到回溯性增强？最近的证据表明存在这样一种机制，当一个类别中的中性刺激的相关类别后来获得动机意义时，该机制可以选择性地增强它们的弱记忆。虽然这种选择性的回溯性记忆增强对适应性记忆有很大的影响，但这种现象的证据仅基于少数几项研究。在这里，我们报告了四项试图复制与后来预测厌恶性电击相关的中性刺激的类别特异性回溯性记忆增强的尝试的数据。尽管我们的数据显示了对唤起刺激本身以及相关后续刺激的记忆增强，但在严格复制原始研究的分析策略时，我们的实验都没有提供任何关于类别特异性回溯性记忆增强的证据。在一个仅关注高置信记忆的额外分析中，四个实验中有一个实验表明存在显著的回溯性记忆效应，但仅在基于信号检测理论的校正识别中，而不是在 d'中。在对所有实验进行的 pooled 分析中，我们再次发现了一个较小但显著的回溯性记忆效应，仅针对高置信校正识别，尽管相应的贝叶斯分析表明对零假设也有相当大的证据。总的来说，我们的数据对所提出的初始弱记忆选择性回溯性增强的可靠性和普遍性提出了质疑。
